"To look at what is there, at nature as it is in itself, at Being, the ancients called... contemplation, theoria. But... if contemplation is left with only the irrelevantly extant, then it loses the noble status... as does the repose in the present... Theoria had that dignity because of its Platonic implications—because it beheld eternal objects in the forms of things, a transcendence of immutable being shining through the transparency of becoming. Immutable being is everlasting present, in which contemplation can share in the brief durations of the temporal present. Thus it is eternity, not time, that grants a present and gives it a status of its own in the flux of time; and it is the loss of eternity which accounts for the loss of a genuine present. Such a loss of eternity is the disappearance of the world of ideas and ideals in which Heidegger sees the true meaning of Nietzsche's "God is dead"; ...[i.e.,] the absolute victory of over realism. ...[T]he same cause which is at the root of nihilism is also at the root of the radical temporality of Heidegger's scheme of existence, in which the present is nothing but the moment of crisis between past and future."
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The Gnostic Religion
The Gnostic Religion:The Message of the Alien God and the Beginning of Christianity (1958) by , differs in scope, organization, and literary intention, but includes much of the information contained in his Gnosis und späntantiker Geist: Die mythologische Gnosis, the first volume of which was published in 1934. An enlarged edition of The Gnostic Religion was published in 1963 with an additional essay, and supplemented to include his research on the , discovered in 1945. This book, particularly th
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